My research focuses on the languages of South Asia, from all major language families and isolates. In my work,I employ methods from different fields of linguistics – including language typology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and language contact, as well as data from my own fieldwork in language description – to delve into the prehistory of the subcontinent. As social contact between speakers of different languages usually leavestraces in these languages, an examination of the distribution of different structural traits throughout the languages of this region can often provide us with detailed information both on earlier settlement patterns of the region as well as these groups’ societies.